Active member

"Image and Link Proxy Secret Key - If you find that links are being accessed via third-party sites, you can change this secret key to expire these links. All links stored on the forum will be automatically updated to use the new secret key."

Here's why I think maybe these are not originating at my forum, but are being accessed from a third party site:

XenForo developer

Changing that value won't help here as the code isn't even getting there.

I'm changing the response code in this case to 400 (for the next release), which indicates a bad request and that the server can't respond due to a client error (in this case, a logic/malformed syntax error). This may still be listed in webmaster tools, but the alternative is returning a 200 which would indicate that the page is valid, which is clearly not correct.

Great idea. I appreciate you thinking of doing this. The real question is whether 400's are also counted against the site ranking-wise, like 500's can sometimes be. If 400's are safe then its fine to return that. But if they're exactly like 500's in googles eyes it might make no difference. Should I ask around?

Active member

Initially i thought if we deleted the broken images on our forums, this would fix the problem.

But:
Actually this has nothing to do with them being broken or not. The external link which is pointing to these images on our site, is malformed.

So broken or not, the problem is the external link. This means that the best we can do in the short term is to delete the image.
This means when google goes to look for it, its going to serve a 404 instead of a 500 most likely. Im hoping.

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EDIT 2: When I deleted the image from our forums, it still serves the 500 on our forum and says malformed proxy ...........................